I use my VCR more than my poor DVD player that just gathers dust now. I'm happy I never put money into a blu-ray player that probably would have never gotten used. Streaming definitely wins in every category.

Well, VCRs haven't really been obsolete all that long, and as folks have noted above, they can still be useful depending on the circumstances. We still have some tapes of stuff that we don't have on DVD, including twelve hours of Ren and Stimpy and the series finale of Seinfeld. I'm not sure anyone's going to have a great desire to watch any of that again, but it's there and available.

And even among those who have abandoned the technology, I'm willing to bet there are folks who still have them just because they haven't gotten around to disconnecting them yet.

I kept a VCR for years and years because I was damned if I was going to get rid of my imported copies of Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and other foreign movies that cost me over $30 each when I was in college in the late 90s.

I'm not as convinced as some that DVDs and Blu-Rays are going to suffer the same obsolescence and mass extinction that VHS tapes have. Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, cable on demand, etc are all accelerating the standard away from physical media, but even in ten years, it's not going to be all streaming and cloud-based.

cxjohn:I have found there to be very little, if any, content worth "delayed" viewing.

I have roughly 13,000 VCRs, in a warehouse full of racks. I'm tying them together into a chronosyncretic esthetonic ion relay network, which takes over 5000 miles of cable. I'm still finishing up the power supply for this--it involves a surreptitious dam on a river whose name I'm afraid I can't mention--and my partner, Indiana Bill, has been working the ebay market for copies of tape 1 of season 3 of The Golden Girls. It should be about three months or so when we can finally pop the last tape into the last VCR, turn the whole thing on, and then...

I have two VHS, two SVHS, and a Betamax. One of each have no Macrovision circuits at all, hence why I keep them around. Its rare to find anything on tape that can't be purchased on DVD at least, if not Blu-Ray or digital download, but it does happen. Early episodes of MST3K spring to mind.

The others are mostly used as tuners for tunerless TVs or monitors, rather than anything else. That's mostly what VCRs are good for these days: tuners. Even that's starting to become less and less relevant as cable services push to all-digital and mandatory set-top boxes, not to mention the over-the-air digital changeover.

I almost picked up a newer VCR a while ago. NTSC, QAM and ATSC tuners, combo'd with a DVD Recorder and DivX/XviD playback. It was like finding a '69 Caddy that'd been converted to hybrid. I have no idea what market they were going after with that thing, but it was so damn strange I almost had to get me one. Price tag was just too high though.

1.) Grab the purple tape.2.) Push it into the VCR.3.) Watch4.) If it ends, go to step 2.

Can't do that with a DVR or DVD.

I actually used to make KVCDs and CVDs specifically for people with kids. Structure the disc right and all you have to do is pop it in the DVD player and hit the play button. Best part is that cartoons and such encode rather well; you can't really spot the quality difference between DVD on a standard def TV.

moothemagiccow:Yeah I had my VCRDVD combo up until just recently. Hooked up to the plasma and everything in case I wanted to watch the definitive version of star wars they released by mistake in the 90s

csbThe kids first experience with Star Wars about a year and a half ago was the VHS tapes I got in the early 90's. Was happy to see that it was the version where Han wastes an oblivious Greedo from under the table. Then the cat decided to use the shelf it was on as a litter box.RIP VHS Star Wars.RIP Osiris./csb

My dad bought a VCR in 83 or 84. It was a giant, heavy, metal beast and it had a remote with a cord. Eventually it was mine, and I kept that thing until it died around age 20 (and it had lived a pretty hard life, too). then got a new one. It was hard to find one that wasn't a VCR/DVD combo, but I did and I still have it.

I bought a compact little TV with a builtin DVD player maybe six or seven years ago for my office. It's rarely ever gotten any use; I quickly found that, if I'm doing anything at all on the computer, I can't have a movie on, it's just irritating. So it gathers dust.

The point is that this kind of technology--very small color TV with digital video playback built right in--came along about 20 years after VCR technology, and yet it's almost as obsolete. Who wants to watch a movie on a cathode ray TV?

I've got boxes of poorly-labeled tapes. My plan was to digitize them in batches, quick-scan through them, clip the stuff of sentimental or historical interest, and discard the rest -- but the last working VCR died before I got started. Any advice on a good workhorse VCR player for a task like this, given that the store shelves are no longer full of them?

/recovering hoarder//doesn't count if it all fits on one drive///okay, a few drives////plus backups

jfarkinB:I've got boxes of poorly-labeled tapes. My plan was to digitize them in batches, quick-scan through them, clip the stuff of sentimental or historical interest, and discard the rest -- but the last working VCR died before I got started. Any advice on a good workhorse VCR player for a task like this, given that the store shelves are no longer full of them?

/recovering hoarder//doesn't count if it all fits on one drive///okay, a few drives////plus backups

If you want to get something old and workable, NEC and JVC both made absolutely indestructible VCRs. NEC in particular is one that I recommend; I've come across NEC VCRs in thrift stores, and invariably they work, and work well, at least for playback. Most NECs don't have Macrovision circuits either, which only complicate things.

For newer stuff, it's kind of a crapshoot. You're better off buying something "professional" rather than consumer, since consumer-grade VCRs started being made with entirely too much plastic, even pieces that really really really should've been metal. To that end I (again) recommend JVC, since their professional grade stuff is quite affordable and well made. To save time sorting through things, try and find an SVHS VCR. 9 times out of 10 you'll be looking at the "professional" model, since SVHS had very little penetration into the consumer market. You'll also get S-Video outputs out of the whole deal, and possibly Component to boot, which can only make things look better.

If you want an all-in-one I can't really point to a specific brand. The only thing I can provide is a warning: a lot of brands do this retarded thing where they write an irregular header to the beginning of the DVD when you start recording on it, specifically to make it unreadable in PCs. You can still pull the information off using the right software, but you can't just pop it in your computer and watch with WMP or something. If you're looking at a specific brand, check the reviews and see if people report being able to read the DVDs in their computers. If not... avoid.

I still use my VCR. Plus tape heads are easy to maintain and tape is more robust and resilient than disc. Some things aren't available on disc (and sometimes even the internet doesn't have them) anyway.